Youth in Self-exile: Layers of Identities and Stories of Leaving Turkey and Turkish Kurdistan
“Why did you decide to leave Turkey?” That’s the question I ask most of the young students from Turkey who have settled in Prague over the past few years—usually right at the start of our conversations. But over time, I come to see the flaw in the question itself: it assumes that the decision to leave was entirely theirs. Their experiences would be better reflected by a question like, “What were the circumstances of your departure?”—or, even more accurately, “What was it that made you leave, and then stay?”
Cansu, Elif, Umut, Yusuf, Ciwan, Fatma, and Zerrin have been living in Prague or Brno for periods ranging from ten months to seven years. Despite their diverse backgrounds, they share a common point of origin—Turkey or Turkish Kurdistan, which I refer to by its Kurdish name, Bakûr—and a shared sense of involuntariness in their departure. For some, this departure constitutes forced migration; for others, the compulsion lies in their continued stay or the fading possibility of return, which often recedes from view amid shifting political and economic conditions.
Part 1
Reclaiming Our Future
Ecem Nazlı Üçok, an expert on political migration at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University, currently researching feminist diasporas from Turkey and Poland in Europe, bridges the conceptual gap between forced migration and voluntary departure by introducing the notion of self-exile—a term that reveals the complex layers behind the appearance of voluntariness. Self-exile accounts for the broad range of forces that drive individuals to leave, often stemming from political repression or threats linked to their activism, beliefs, or identity. At the same time, the prefix “self” highlights the affective dimension of this experience. “It’s usually about the feeling that you don’t belong, that your self is not accepted by others,” says Üçok. “You begin to distance yourself from that space, and over time, this internal separation becomes physical as well.”
Seven young people between the ages of 26 and 36—whose names have been changed for the purposes of this report—find themselves somewhere along the spectrum of self-imposed exile. Their stories are shaped by distinct configurations of economic constraints—such as the impossibility of leading a dignified life—and explicit political pressures—such as the inability to live in safety. Beyond individual motivations, their migratory trajectories and relationships to their new home, the Czech Republic, are also shaped by intersecting forms of oppression related to gender and sexual identity, class, religion, and ethnicity. This two-part account seeks to trace those intersections and how they co-produce both departure and belonging.
The Gezi Generation
“If you had asked me six months ago, I would have given you a different answer. I always planned to return to my family and friends. But the situation has changed so much that I no longer see any hope. I’m staying so that I can have a future,” says Cansu, who left her native Ankara, the capital of Turkey, almost four years ago. At the time, she decided to pursue a master’s degree abroad after struggling to find a satisfying job following her bachelor’s degree. Unlike in Germany or the Nordic countries, tuition fees at Charles University are relatively low, and wages from bar work far exceed what one could earn in Turkey for the same job.
The year 2020 marked a deepening of Turkey’s long-standing economic crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic. It also saw a rise in authoritarianism, increasingly repressive governance, and a fusion of ethno-nationalism, neoliberal populism, and neoconservative Islamism. The current situation—including the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul and waves of student-led anti-government protests—pushed Cansu to reevaluate her future. These developments are the product of 23 years of rule by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP party, but they are also part of a broader history of dissent, first expressed on a mass scale during the 2013 Gezi protests. Cansu took part in the Gezi demonstrations in Ankara—her first political action—until the police began killing protesters her age.
According to Üçok, the sharpest rise in emigration over the past twelve years corresponds closely with the AKP’s increasingly authoritarian governance. Key turning points include the Gezi Park protests in 2013; the failed military coup in 2016, followed by prolonged states of emergency; and the 2017 referendum that dismantled the parliamentary system in favor of a presidential one. During this period, the academic community—particularly those who signed the “Academics for Peace” petition calling for an end to the Turkish state’s war against the PKK in Bakûr—became targets of institutional purges.
“I had just returned from the Netherlands, where I had completed my master’s degree, and was planning to find a job. But all my professors were gone, and my former classmates were looking for ways to leave,” Elif recalls. While her first migration trajectory aligned with Cansu’s motivation—to seek a better life—her second departure, this time to the Czech Republic, was driven by the fact that life as a recent graduate was becoming increasingly untenable. Beyond economic precarity, the pressures stemmed from Erdoğan’s increasingly repressive policies targeting students. Being a student has itself become a site of marginalization—a mechanism of exclusion that expands to encompass all those who do not conform to the regime’s desired social model, one best exemplified by cisheterosexual, devout Sunni ethnic Turks. Students are excluded because of their potential to voice dissent.
“Erdoğan wants to raise a generation of passive people—those who won’t question his rule or vision for Turkey,” Ciwan remarks, reflecting on the president’s approach to students since the Gezi protests. Back then, Ciwan joined the demonstrations in the streets of Muğla, a small coastal town in western Turkey where he was studying. Today’s student protests represent a continuation—and culmination—of resistance to enforced passivity. Students are branded as terrorists and subjected to arbitrary arrests, even if they’re not actively protesting but simply standing on the street holding a banner. “No one has died during these protests yet, unlike during Gezi,” he adds. “But one student in prison is being denied critical medical treatment. They simply want her to die. The mentality of the state hasn’t changed. Once again, young people are paying with their future.”
Resistance Is a Space for Encounters
I meet Ciwan at one of the events organized by the Prague Solidarity collective, a group formed around mutual support—a sentiment that many of the respondents share with the ongoing protests in Turkey. “Of course it’s my struggle,” says Elif. “Wherever I go, I’ll always feel close to it. We share the same experiences, the same emotions. I’ll never forget the moments from Gezi. What’s happening now is a continuation of everything Gezi stood against.”
If a Turkish community is beginning to take shape in the Czech Republic, it’s doing so through initiatives like these. Those who moved here after the Gezi protests tend to be politically visible, and the recent earthquake served as a catalyst for them to connect more actively with one another. Yet their networks extend beyond political collectives—cultural spaces are just as significant. For instance, Cansu met most of her Turkish friends at solidarity events “for Turkey,” many of which she supports through performances with her band.
At one of their concerts, I briefly feel transported to the streets of Istanbul—not just by the traditional sweets and nuts handed out by the trio of singers, but by the intergenerational crowd of Turkish-speaking participants. Like me, Cansu is curious about how many people in the room are from the Czech Republic. Aside from my raised hand, I notice only one other. I turn to Umut and ask, “Where did all these people come from?” She explains that many belong to an older generation who arrived in the Czech Republic in the 1990s, following a series of trade agreements between the two countries. They tend to gather around Turkish music and theater performances, which are often framed as apolitical. “They don’t want to be too visible, you know,” she says. “They live comfortable lives.” Üçok reflects on this dynamic: “I don’t think you can observe more than two generations here, as you can in Germany, for instance. The diaspora in the Czech Republic has only begun forming in the last few years. But I believe that will change in the next thirty years. The country isn’t as closed as it used to be, and the fact that I was driven by a taxi driver from Turkey both in the morning and afternoon also reflects the diversity of the class backgrounds among those who come to the Czech Republic; it is no longer just the upper middle class or students.
Leaving Is the First Step Toward Return
They grew under President Erdoğan, who rose to power—and gradually consolidated it in his own hands—when they were just a few years old. Now, they are fed up with the invisibility they’ve been subjected to since adolescence. “You know, he stole our childhood and is stealing our future,” Cansu, Elif, and Umut agree. On her way to school, Umut used to pass the spot where Berkin Elvan, a 15-year-old student, was killed during the Gezi protests after being struck by a police-fired gas canister. “You’re exposed to everything, even as a child. It unfolds not only on the streets but also within your family,” she says. “These systems work on and through the body. You must become digestible to survive them.” This is what pushed her to leave for Prague immediately after high school, less than seven years ago.
She doesn’t romanticize life in the Czech Republic, but in some ways, she experiences it as a reversal of what she left behind. Rather than shrinking herself, she had to push twice as hard—and that effort became a source of strength. “I left so I wouldn’t have to keep running.” She describes not having been directly targeted by the system in Turkey—while others were—as both a curse and a blessing.
Umut is not the only one to confide in me that she feels guilt—or even shame—about leaving without being able to fully trace the origins of these emotions. “It was guilt and fear that pushed me into the corners where the state wants us to exist. I had to move beyond that fear and take responsibility,” she explains. In recent months, she’s found herself increasingly dreaming of returning. What sparked this shift was the devastating impact of the two consecutive earthquakes that struck southeastern Turkey in 2023—disasters that also triggered a new wave of departures. In the aftermath, she co-founded the Hayde (Come/Let’s go!) collective and began curating an alternative archive of the catastrophe, holding its deadly consequences accountable to an absent, corrupt, and neoliberal state. The collective is built on values that run counter to this: instead of division and exclusion, it fosters mutual aid and collective learning. Umut and others are working to create a platform, in her words, “where it’s not about saving one of us, but where we can save each other.”
The Fading European Dream
The collectives founded by the young Turkish diaspora in Prague are not enclaves of nationalism but rather expressions of responsibility—toward their friends, their communities, and themselves. For Cansu, Elif, Umut, and Yusuf, this sense of responsibility is not primarily a reaction to exclusion in Czech society—which, as Üçok notes, naturally accompanies many migration trajectories—but rather a response to the guilt they carry. This guilt, paradoxically, becomes a catalyst for political consciousness and action. “This is my first experience of political mobilization,” confides Yusuf from the Prague Solidarity collective. “And finally, I feel like I’m justifying my presence here. Of course, it’s a great privilege—but at times, it feels like a burden.” His sense that he must somehow earn the right to exist in a foreign country stems not only from his experience of self-exile but also from the systems of invisibility Umut described. “You live in an environment where you can’t even afford a cup of coffee, and that’s promoted as normal life. The state wants you to believe this is normal,” Yusuf adds. For him, life in Prague has become a space to think beyond these imposed limits—a space where he can “allow himself to dream.”
For many young people, the dream of Europe has long served as a reference point—an imagined elsewhere that promised protection, opportunity, and freedom. But this perception has been shifting in recent years. According to Üçok, this change is largely driven by the transformation of European migration policy, especially in Germany. “When I talk to my former teachers and classmates, they often express outrage that the very conditions they fled have followed them. Even here, they don’t feel their rights are protected or that the state stands up for them,” she explains. The disillusionment, however, runs deeper than policy. It also stems from European governments’ support for Israel’s assault on Gaza—a stance condemned not only by all six respondents but also by my friends and peers still living in Turkey. “I didn’t leave a regime that sees me as a terrorist to live in a country that approves and supports a fascist, genocidal government,” says Umut. “I think Gen Z feels the same. They no longer see Europe as a meaningful alternative—because in their eyes, it’s losing the legitimacy that once sustained that dream.” Instead, Üçok adds, “they now want to cultivate and fight for an alternative directly in Turkey.” Umut echoes this resolve: “I realized that the country won’t heal itself—we must be part of that process. Together, and in mutuality.”
“As a Queer Person, I Don’t Get to Exist in My Country.”
“Was your departure influenced in any way by the political situation?” I ask Yusuf, who arrived in Prague three years ago to pursue a master’s degree while also teaching. Before that, he worked as an English teacher in Pazarcık, a town in southeastern Turkey near the port city of Mersin, where he is originally from. “It was because of the policies toward queer people in general. I don’t have the right to exist in my own country,” he replies, referring in part to recent laws that prohibit public expressions of gender and sexual identity and criminalize LGBTQIA symbols.
Yet the issue is not only the state’s anti-LGBTQIA agenda—systematically framed since 2021 as a threat to national security, family values, and public morality—but also how that agenda is materially and emotionally experienced by queer individuals such as Yusuf or Zerrin, who expresses her identity in part through her short hair. “So, does that mean I couldn’t have short hair? What if a man has painted nails?” she asks, only half-rhetorically. “I always felt like I didn’t belong. Wherever I went, people looked at me in a way that made it clear I wasn’t accepted,” Yusuf shares.
Of course, there are spaces where queer people carve out safety and community—within friendships, collectives, or certain neighborhoods in Istanbul and other large cities where the state’s gaze is, at times, more easily evaded. “But the very fact that these safe spaces are so spatially concentrated shows how deeply queerness is shaped by material and spatial conditions,” explains Üçok. At the same time, she resists the two dominant narratives she often hears from international friends: one that paints Turkey as entirely hostile to queer life, and another that romanticizes Istanbul as a queer oasis. Both narratives, she argues, strip the queer community of its agency—its ability to resist, to become visible in the face of invisibility, or to leave on its own terms.
“I enjoy being able to be who I want to be here—without feeling like I don’t belong, and without the unsolicited comments you constantly get in Turkey,” Yusuf reflects on life in the Czech Republic as a queer person. Yet at times, he also feels a sense of loneliness. “I’m not used to this kind of human experience,” he says. Like Cansu, Elif, and Umut, he finds it more difficult to form close relationships with locals—not only because of the language barrier but also due to a cultural reserve that contrasts sharply with what they’re used to in Turkey. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing—it’s just different. People here are very empathetic, but it takes longer to get to know them, and it takes more energy,” Yusuf explains.
If there is a culture shock, it lies less in everyday routines and more in the absence of a strong sense of community, spontaneous help, or visible expressions of care. The issue isn’t a lack of willingness to integrate on the part of the respondents, but rather the limits of integration itself—bound, as Yusuf and others suggest, by how much the host society allows or invites it. “I used to be very critical of earlier generations of guest workers in Germany—of their support for Erdoğan and their nationalist leanings,” Cansu admits. “But now I understand it differently. When you have nothing else to connect to, it’s easy to fall back on what’s familiar.”
Building Community in Self-Exile
The layers that shape community building in exile are as complex and varied as the experiences of self-exile itself—and they are not defined solely by the efforts of those who “try to fit in.” “When the earthquake struck Turkey, no one but those with family or close ties there could understand what I was feeling,” Yusuf confides. Umut shares this sentiment: “You can’t just take your nationality off—especially not in Turkey, where it’s instilled in you from a very young age.” And yet, young people from Turkey are actively stepping outside their comfort zones, challenging binaries, and seeking common ground across their differences—through alternative archiving, solidarity with those who share similar experiences, and intercultural connections through music. “I’ll always be a Praguer, a Turk, and an immigrant at the same time,” Umut says, pushing back against the binary logic of national identity.
I, too, try to resist these binaries when I ask questions that often fall short because they rely on either/or formulations that can’t capture the multiplicity and messiness of lived identity. These questions unintentionally echo the discourses and frameworks of nation-states, which pressure individuals to choose one side over another. Even individualism, which my respondents describe as an early and deeply rooted element of Czech (and more broadly European) society, is not viewed in absolute terms—as inherently negative or positive. Rather, it is something “you feel in your body, that shapes your experience, and that you try to work with in order to enrich yourself,” as Cansu, Elif, Umut, Yusuf, Ciwan, and Zerrin all agree.
Part II
Identities as a Geopolitical Battleground
In the second part of the story, we move from Turkey to its southeastern region–Bakûr, or Northern Kurdistan. While the first part explored departures driven by economic and political instability and the impossibility of openly expressing one’s sexual or gender identity, this section introduces another crucial dimension: ethnicity and the state’s policies toward it.
The stories of Ciwan, Fatma, Zerrin, and others reveal how ethnic, religious, and gender-based marginalization intersect, shaping both the decision to leave and the everyday realities of life in self-imposed exile. Kurdish identity—long subjected to suppression, criminalization, and forced assimilation from early childhood—continues to assert itself in exile. It emerges not only as a site of pain and further assimilation, but also as a political position and a form of resistance.
“When You’re Kurdish, It’s Ten Times Harder Just to Survive.”
I first met Ciwan at a benefit concert, where he performed a special set inspired by Kurdish folklore. He blends in easily, wearing a traditional khaki jumpsuit with a colorful belt—an outfit commonly worn in Bakûr during celebrations and holidays—and speaks openly about his experience with compulsory military service. This institution—an ethno-nationalist, cisheteropatriarchal structure that every (cisheterosexually perceived) man in Turkey is expected to undergo—takes on a different meaning for Kurds. “You feel like you’re participating in your own subjugation,” Ciwan reflects.
Kurds—numbering twenty million in Turkey—have long been a central minority through which the state has enacted its ideals of unity, sovereignty, and cultural homogeneity since the founding of the republic. The Kurdish-populated region of Northern Kurdistan (Bakûr), located in the country’s southeast, has functioned as a testing ground for repressive state policies. Forms of governance that are now being extended to other segments of society—queer people, students, and more recently, the broader urban majority mobilizing in protests—were first “tried out” on Kurdish populations.
Since the 1980s, the Turkish state’s actions in Bakûr have been justified by the fight against the PKK guerrilla movement. While the Turkish state—and most Western governments—classify the PKK as a separatist, militant, and terrorist organization, many Kurds view it as a Marxist-inspired emancipation movement, advocating not only for Kurdish autonomy but for basic human rights. In the 1990s, the state’s war against the Kurdish population reached a brutal peak with the so-called village evacuations: widespread burning and forced displacement that created a wave of internal forced migration, primarily to Istanbul and nearby cities such as Adana and Mersin.
“I grew up in the middle of the conflict, falling asleep to gunfire. It wasn’t safe for anyone—let alone children,” Ciwan recalls of his first departure. He was seven years old when his parents sent him from their hometown near Nusaybin, on the Syrian border, to live with an uncle in Germany. Their town had avoided destruction only because it housed a military base, unlike the surrounding villages, many of which were burned. Ciwan didn’t return to Turkey until he enrolled at the University of Muğla, where he initially believed he would remain in academia. But like many of his peers, he couldn’t find stable employment. “Reality,” he says, “hit me hard in the face.” “Turkey is hell for anyone who doesn’t support Erdoğan, but when you’re Kurdish, it’s ten times harder just to survive.” And so, he left once again—this time in his thirties, settling in a small town on the Czech periphery.
The Conflict Does Not End at the Border
“In Turkey, you spend so much energy trying to convince even the most progressive and leftist people that, as a Kurd, you have the same right to exist as anyone else in the world. And then, in a small town abroad, you’re immediately identified as Muslim—just by the color of your skin,” Ciwan says. His reflection highlights not only the deep-rooted ethno-nationalist racism Kurds face in Turkey and the Islamophobia prevalent in the Czech Republic—reinforced, he notes, by widespread anti-Muslim propaganda—but also a frequent paradox in migration trajectories from Turkey and Bakûr.
German-Kurdish writer Fatma Aydemir, in her autofictional novel Djinns, calls this condition “double assimilation.” It challenges simplified accounts of labor migration from Turkey to Germany, which was often framed as a promise of better income. For many ethnic and religious minorities, however, it also offered an escape from the violent assimilation policies of the Turkish state. “It was the intellectuals, the women, the dissidents, and of course the ethnic minorities who were persecuted—and who Germany accepted in large numbers at the time. But among them, the host society made no distinction,” explains Sindre Langmoen, who explored the Turkish diaspora in Germany and its transnational mobilization in his master’s thesis at FSV UK. This created a cruel irony: Kurds who fled Turkish assimilation to express their identity freely found themselves branded “dirty Turks” in Germany.
Double assimilation also does little to ease tensions between Turkish and Kurdish people beyond the border. Ciwan recalls growing up in Germany, where he faced racist insults and even physical violence in a multicultural classroom—not from German students, but from Turkish classmates. Fatma describes a similar trajectory: she lost many of her “Turkish” friendships upon discovering her Kurdish identity. Both come from political families, and Ciwan is fluent in Kurdish. But they are not representative of the majority experience—many Kurdish families, in both Turkey and the diaspora, hide their ethnic identity from their children to protect them. In Djinns, Aydemir’s protagonists only learn they are Kurdish at their father’s funeral. Fatma was never addressed in Kurdish at home.
According to Langmoen, many Gastarbeiters (guest workers) included Turkish right-wing nationalists, some of whom went on to found organizations later classified as fascist—most notoriously, the Grey Wolves. Closely tied to the far-right MHP party in Turkey, which now governs in coalition with the AKP, the Grey Wolves have also been linked to neo-Nazi groups in Germany and have often directed their hostility toward Kurdish residents. “The diaspora from Turkey in Germany is extremely layered. There are many internal conflicts that can’t be reduced to ethnicity alone—yet ethnicity remains the dominant dividing force,” Langmoen notes.
The Turkish-Kurdish conflict—or rather, the Turkish state’s war on the Kurds—does not stop at the border. On the contrary, it often intensifies in exile. This is further enabled by the Turkish state’s extensive outreach to its diaspora through strong institutional networks, constitutional provisions, and unofficial channels such as religious organizations, particularly mosques. “Even when you become a migrant,” Ciwan concludes, “your Kurdish identity—or its criminalization—catches up with you in different shades.”
“I Wanted to Be Invisible for a While.”
Fatma was born in Germany. Her family fled following the so-called Maraş Massacre in 1978, when the Grey Wolves—an ultranationalist paramilitary group—carried out a coordinated attack, with the complicity of the Turkish army, murdering over one hundred leftist activists and Kurdish Alevis in the city of Kahramanmaraş. The violence soon spread to nearby towns, unleashing a wave of fear and displacement. This massacre was not an isolated incident but part of a longer history of persecution against Alevis, rooted in the Ottoman Empire’s treatment of their heterodox interpretation of Islam. That history culminated in the Dersim genocide of the late 1930s, during which thousands of Kurdish Alevi rebels and civilians were killed by the Turkish state.
“If there’s anything worse than being a Kurd, it’s being a Kurd and not a Sunni Muslim,” Fatma remarks when we meet on a spring evening in Prague, referring to her Alevi identity. I am lucky to speak with her before she returns to Germany. Her trajectory differs from that of the other participants in this reportage—she visits Bakûr only occasionally, specifically the town of Malatya, to see her grandparents. Yet the reasons she left Germany echo those of the six individuals who left Turkey. She recalls how, as a child, she sometimes hid her Kurdish and Alevi identity—especially during Quranic lessons that often overlapped with Turkish language classes offered in German schools.
Alevism is a syncretic and highly diverse belief system, rooted in Shi’a Islam but often viewed as heretical by Sunni orthodoxy. Alevis themselves, however, typically see it less as a religion and more as a mystical philosophy and source of communal identity. Some branches, particularly those aligned with socialist-feminist traditions—like the one Fatma identifies with—don’t consider themselves Muslim at all. “It’s strange—you’re a child, and you don’t even know what it means. You just sense that it’s better not to say it out loud. And later, you’re expected to be strong, even though you’re being oppressed,” she reflects.
For several years, the Czech Republic offered her a kind of refuge from the various manifestations of “the conflict.” “People here are less invested in your identity; many don’t even know what ‘Kurd’ or ‘Kurdistan] means—and at one point, that’s exactly what I needed,” she explains, speaking of her decision to pursue a PhD in Prague instead of staying in Germany. But even Germany has changed. With the rise of international attention to the Rojava revolution in Eastern Kurdistan—often romanticized in the West as a ready-made feminist, ecological, and horizontally democratic project—Fatma has observed a shift in how Kurds are perceived. In certain circles, she says, Kurds, and particularly Kurdish women, have become fetishized. “I often feel tokenized,” she says. “For some Germans, Kurds are proof that Western values can be realized in the Middle East. They basically appropriate what people in Rojava have built.”
At the same time, she notes how Turkish narratives attempt to erase difference altogether. “There’s this effort to convince you that ‘we’re all Turkish after all’—which completely erases histories of violence and resistance, like saying ‘All Lives Matter’ in response to our pain,” she adds with a bitter laugh. In the Czech Republic, she says, the complexities of her identity are obscured under the simple label of foreigner. In Germany, by contrast, the pressure is constant—either to hide and be automatically read as Turkish, or to declare her Kurdishness and become hyper-visible. “There’s no escaping it. You will always run into Turks in Germany.”
A Migrant with an Adjective
Like Cansu, Elif, and Umut, Fatma identifies language as the most significant barrier in the Czech Republic. “Czechs immediately classify you as a foreigner the moment they realize you don’t speak their language. And that’s fair enough—you really are a foreigner in that sense. But I hear the same kinds of comments in my home country, too. I’m German, but always with an adjective. They call it ‘German with a migrant background,’” she says, drawing parallels between her experiences in Germany and the Czech Republic.
The identity of an immigrant is something all seven respondents engage with—not only as a label imposed on them in everyday encounters, but also as something they attempt to reclaim. In this context, E. Üçok criticizes the toxic distinction between “expat” and “immigrant”—a hierarchy that frames those who migrated voluntarily as “better,” while casting others as people who “ran away.” Fatma resists this hierarchy by turning the stigma of her so-called migrant background on its head: she proudly reclaims the word Kanak, historically used as a derogatory term in Germany for migrants from the Balkans and the SWANA region.
“I miss the Kurdish community and my friends,” she says when asked why she’s returning to Germany. “I’ve been searching for that here for three and a half years, but in vain.” Compared to Germany, the Kurdish community in the Czech Republic is much less visible. Older-generation Kurds, who arrived on work visas, are employed in kebab shops—jobs so physically demanding and time-consuming that they leave little room for community-building or political organizing. “And unlike countries like Sweden or France, the Czech Republic has historically granted very few asylum requests,” Langmoen points out.
“I Left Because I’m Kurdish—and I’m Queer.”
More surprising, then, is my experience in Brno—though it partly confirms Langmoen’s observations. Zerrin invites me to her current home—not her own, but that of her friend Mazlum, who runs a kebab shop in Brno. In the backyard sits Baran, who arrived in the city just five days ago after waiting a full year for his visa. All three are from Amed (Diyarbakır in Turkish), the symbolic capital of Bakûr, which was the epicenter of large-scale military operations by the Turkish state as recently as 2015. And they are not alone in Brno. “There are about a hundred of us here,” Mazlum estimates, “from Rojava, Başûr (Iraqi Kurdistan), Urfa, and Gaziantep.” As he maps the transnational face of Kurdistan, he smoothly switches into perfect English while serving customers. He’s only owned the kebab shop for three months but already has plans to expand. “And I’ll probably have to rename it Amed. There are already too many Roj kebabs,” he jokes, nodding to the strong presence of fellow Rojava Kurds.
Zerrin is in Brno as a master’s student, like the other six respondents in this report. She’s just received the results from her first year—and she passed. “It hasn’t been easy,” she says, describing the adjustment to an unfamiliar academic system. But going back was never an option. “You know, I’m queer. I didn’t feel safe in Turkey. I left because I’m Kurdish and queer.”
When Zerrin says she didn’t feel safe in Turkey, she’s not only referring to state institutions. Her sense of danger also stems from her family, which she sees not as an autonomous or private sphere but as an extension of the state’s repressive apparatus. Zerrin is half Armenian—her maternal grandparents came from Mardin, a city that became one of the epicenters of the so-called marches into the Syrian desert, which culminated in the genocide of Christian minorities—Armenians and Assyrians—within the Ottoman Empire in the 1910s.
At the time, many Muslim Kurds were complicit in the genocide, sometimes as a survival strategy. Christian women and children—including members of Zerrin’s extended family—survived only through forced conversions to Islam and marriages with local Kurdish men. Today, Zerrin describes her family as strongly religious and conservative, their Islamic identity overriding any sense of ethnic plurality. Her Armenian heritage remains unspoken and suppressed. “You know, it’s just haram [forbidden]. As haram as being queer,” Zerrin says, recalling how her family rejected her when she came out. “At least I could hide from my family. I studied at the University of Adana before moving to Istanbul for work, and I only lived with them until I was eleven. But you can’t hide from the state.”
Family: The Foundation of the State
In Istanbul, Zerrin worked as an English teacher at a private school. She was fired after school management saw her holding hands with a colleague, her partner. It was the school itself that informed her family. Üçok emphasizes the importance of not viewing the family as a private unit emerging in a vacuum but rather as deeply embedded in the broader structures of state power. In the context of modern Turkey, this relationship is captured by the concept of devlet baba, or “father state”—a patriarchal model in which the state is imagined as a paternal authority with the legitimate right to make decisions on behalf of its “children,” the citizens. The family, in turn, becomes a key institution for reproducing the state’s moral and gendered order.
In this framework, queerness is not simply haram in a religious sense, as Zerrin’s family claimed, but is also positioned as illegitimate within the political and legal order of the state. The Turkish state has long instrumentalized Islam to reinforce a cisheteropatriarchal, Sunni model of the ideal family: headed by an ethnic Turkish man, with a housewife and four children. “But even the most secular person can be the biggest homophobe,” Üçok notes, pointing to the structural continuities between secularism and political Islam. “After all, the secular model of the family was also cisheteropatriarchal—modeled on the logic of the secular state.”
Kurds Against Kurds
For Baran, political Islam was also a decisive factor in his decision to leave. In Amed, he worked as a substitute teacher and experimented with dance in public spaces. He shows me a video of himself performing in front of the Sur walls, a powerful symbol of Amed. During one of these performances, he was attacked by Islamic nationalists—members of the Turkish Hezbollah. His decision to leave was also shaped by disillusionment with his previous job as an engineer. “I worked on a construction site. After the earthquake that also hit Amed, I had to sign off buildings as safe even though they weren’t. I don’t want to mess with people’s lives anymore,” he says. These experiences led him to try his luck in Brno. Before opening his own dance studio, he helps out Mazlum at the kebab shop.
Mazlum, for his part, is content in Brno. He frequently visits his family in Amed and his brother in Berlin, but he finds Berlin too similar to Turkey. “You run into Turkish people at every turn. Here, I can be more political. In Turkey, I’d go to jail for my views,” he tells me when we touch on the “hot topics” of current developments in the Kurdish question. These include renewed peace talks between the Turkish state and the PKK, the fate of its imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan, and the political ascent of the Kurdish party DEM (formerly HDP), which has gained popularity since the 2000s. Unlike the PKK, DEM is considered by the state—at least officially—a legitimate political actor. Yet the Turkish government continues to target the party through unlawful means, including the arrest of elected Kurdish mayors and the imposition of state-appointed trustees (kayyum), as well as the persecution of countless activists.
The policy of trusteeship exemplifies how authoritarian practices targeting Kurds have increasingly extended to other segments of society. What begins as an exceptional regime in the Kurdish provinces becomes a tool of broader societal control. Erdoğan’s attempts to eliminate dissent, whether Kurdish, leftist, or otherwise, reflect a strategy of governing through repression—not only at the state’s periphery but across the whole of Turkey.
“I Carry My Home with Me.”
I end up spending over four hours in the courtyard of the Brno kebab shop, long after I’ve turned off the recorder. The Kurdish trio speaks openly about the complexities of the Turkish-Kurdish “conflict,” but their conversation itself embodies the heterogeneity of Kurdish experiences—and, at times, the intra-Kurdish tensions that shape political views. The ambiguity and fragility of what it might mean to heed Öcalan’s call to lay down arms or restructure the PKK unfold live in a verbal skirmish between Zerrin and Mazlum, whose divergent life experiences and identities inform their opposing positions. And yet, none of the three expresses even the slightest sympathy for Erdoğan’s current attempt to instrumentalize the Kurds once again—this time by positioning the secular, urban vote base of the oppositional CHP as the new common enemy. Against this backdrop, promises to democratize Bakûr, to allow Kurdish-language education, or to release imprisoned Kurdish politicians ring hollow—especially when even Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem İmamoğlu, has been arrested under allegations of collaborating with a “terrorist Kurdish organization.” Notably, this time the accusation did not involve the PKK, but rather the DEM party—long considered the more moderate, legal political representation of Kurdish voices in Turkey.
“Brno is my home because I can express myself freely here. I can finally be who I want to be,” Zerrin tells me as we wrap up our conversation—like most others—with the question: What does home mean to you? In retrospect, a better question might have been: What actually makes it up?
None of my respondents claims they do not feel at home in the Czech Republic. On the contrary, home is created, embodied, and performed here—through friendships, community, music, and everyday cultural rituals. “I don’t feel more at home in Turkey than anywhere else. Home depends on who surrounds you and how those others relate to you,” says Yusuf. Elif echoes this sentiment: “I know it’s a cliché, but I carry my home with me. I create it with my memories and experiences. It is in Turkey, in the Netherlands, and here.” They may have left their original homes behind, but in exile they carry them onward—in memory, in the body, in relationships, and in the rhythms of daily life. For them, Prague and Brno are not just safer spaces for self-expression. They are also sites of new affinities, emerging solidarities, and shared stories. At the same time, these cities bring challenges: linguistic and cultural barriers, a more individualistic social fabric, and a sense of emotional distance that young people must learn to navigate.
Many of them also question the very category of nationality. It loses its defining grip, giving way to proximities that are cultural, generational, and affective. Unlike the German-Turkish diaspora, whose longer and more complex history often carries ethno-nationalist tensions across generations and borders, the Turkish and Kurdish youth diaspora in the Czech Republic is still in the making. This gives it a unique task: not to replicate inherited conflicts, but to search for new ways of living together that do not erase histories of colonial or ethno-nationalist violence but allow for their reworking across lines of difference.
“I don’t want to diminish the struggles of other migrants,” Yusuf says, “but in some ways, my migration was forced too.” His trajectory mirrors that of the six others I interviewed—and defines the through-line of this report. The stories of Cansu, Elif, Umut, Yusuf, Ciwan, Fatma, and Zerrin do not claim to represent all paths of life in self-exile, but they do illuminate its breadth and complexity.
Each of them is trying to reclaim a future—whether that means living under better economic conditions or simply being able to live their identity. Their youth is not only a methodological category; it is a political one. It disrupts the image of young people as passive recipients of Erdoğan’s ideology and reveals instead their critical agency—their refusal to comply, their dissatisfaction with inherited norms, and their capacity to reimagine belonging. In their stories, we see how “home” is not simply left behind but reassembled. And how Turkish and Kurdish communities, in the Czech Republic and beyond, are not just formed by migration, but actively shape themselves in response to it.
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This article was published as part of PERSPECTIVES – the new label for independent, constructive and multi-perspective journalism. PERSPECTIVES is co-financed by the EU and implemented by a transnational editorial network from Central-Eastern Europe under the leadership of Goethe-Institut. Find out more about PERSPECTIVES: goethe.de/perspectives_eu.
Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible.
